wacky travel tales | Saying nothing in particular

Destination Unknown

“What troubles you?” Asked Frau Schwimmer in a voice quivering on irritation. All of the other passengers were nesting comfortably in their seats, trying to catch a few hours of sleep before landing on the other side of the world. But not the young woman assigned to the aisle seat next to her.

“Nothing, um Nichts.” Thirty thousand feet below lay snow and ice infinitum. Ahead, the veil of darkness called night. Soon the plane would cut through that veil like a silver arrow rounding the curve of the earth, that is, if it didn’t crash in the frozen wastelands of Northern Canada. If that happened, Flight 32 would be lost forever. No search and rescue team would ever be able find the wreckage in all that whiteness. The passengers would have to eat each other to stay alive, like the Donner party. That is, if the plane landed intact, which it wouldn’t. It would tumble across the tundra, leaving bodies mangled in the metal as food for hungry polar bears.

The fidgeting continued. Frau Schwimmer noted the crumpled map on the young woman’s lap. “Where are you going?

“I don’t know. The town is called Gunthersblum but I can’t find it on the map.”

“We will find!” Frau Schwimmer pulled an industrial sized map of Germany out of her woven travel bag and patted the young woman on the hand. “Have not angst.”

Easy for her to say. She knows exactly where she’s going!

The plane shook violently. The seat belt lights flashed. “Air turbulence,” the pilot announced in English, then German, then French.

He’s lying. The plane’s lost an engine, sucked in a goose, or ruptured a gas line. It was going down.

Frau Schwimmer unfolded her map and calmly spread it over their two tray tables. “Ist these Gunthersblum Nord or Sud?”

“I don’t know.”

What an idiot? Frau Schwimmer’s thinking. Who flies to the other side of the world without knowing where they’re going? Certainly not her thirty year old daughter, the one already established and on her own in San Francisco.

“First we check index.” Frau Schwimmer ran her finger down the list of towns and villages: “Gunthersblum. Nein, Gunthersberg? Nein. Guntherslauten? Nein.” She turned to the hapless young woman. “You have perhaps written down the wrong name. There is no Gunthersblum.”

Dear Blogging Buddies – I’m re-editing a story that was published under the title The Graduate Present back in 2016. This story has taken me so long to write that it bears little resemblance to the maiden voyage on which it was based. Except for Herr Azmus. I have my high school yearbook to prove that he, at least, was real.

Shame on you Herr Azmus! You should have warned your German class about bidets and putzfraus!

MtSteMichel4

The next place on Carolyn’s Must See list was Mont Saint Michel which I’d never heard of. However, friends, that is the best way to first see this amazing place for the first time – with virgin eyes. We were still miles away when it began to take shape through the mist hanging over the marshy farmland. It looked like a pyramid. Or like the hat of a Chinaman rising from the sea.

As we got closer the castle walls came into view, clinging impossibly to the sides of a rock. Who would built a castle on a rock in the bay, I thought. Later I learned it was not a castle but an abbey, built in the eighth century by the bishop of nearby Avranches. His motivation was self-preservation. It seems the Archangel Michael really, really wanted an abbey built on what had heretofore been a useless mound accessible only during low tide. And so, when the bishop ignored the archangel’s demands (delivered to him in dreams) Archangel Michael blew a gasket and thrust his pointer finger through the bishop’s skull. (bishop’s skull info here).

Mont Saint Michel isn’t easy to get to, even today. There aren’t a lot of signs, the roads are two lane asphalt and the nearest town, Avranches, doesn’t exactly pimp itself as the “Gateway to Mont St. Michel” so you can imagine what it was like back in 1970. Because I knew nothing about the place, I went along with Carolyn’s calculation of a day’s travel time. She was wrong. It’s located in at southern tip of Normandy (the northwest corner of France). Of course it didn’t help that we started out late after a big breakfast with Hans and Klaus.

By noon Carolyn wasn’t hungry. I warned her that we’d better stop and eat. European restaurants weren’t open all day long like in the US. She didn’t believe me and we pushed on past the larger towns of Marseilles and Toulouse until somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, Carolyn decided she was starving. It was two fifteen in the afternoon. “There has to be someplace open for lunch,” Carolyn whined as we encountered town after town whose cafes were closed until nightfall. Whose bakeries were closed until the morning. Whose tiny stores looked unsavory to her. Finally along about 3:30 we passed a roadside stand with a hand painted sign that read “Samwitches.”

“Stop!” Carolyn ordered. “I have to eat.”

“The French don’t really eat sandwiches,” I warned as we made a U turn.

“I’m starving. I have to have something.”

“Okay.”

The farmer smiled enthusiastically as we approached. “What do you sell?” I asked in french.

“Samwitch de sausages et samwitch de fromages,” he replied.

Carolyn ordered the sausage samwitch and I ordered the fromage. He grabbed a fat sausage hanging from a hook behind him and with grimy hands and a bloody cleaver hacked off a piece on an old crate. Then he took the same cleaver and hacked off the end of a baquette. Proudly he handed the resulting samwitch to Carolyn. Blood soaked through the bottom layer of bread as with ashen face she paid him and quickly walked back to the car. Mine was a little more appetizing – although there were bits of straw in the soft cheese and it smelled funny. A few miles down the road we discarded Carolyn’s samwitch. I offered to share mine but she claimed the cheese was rancid. I suspect it was the memory of the farmer’s grimy hands that caused her appetite to disappear. That night we stopped at the small town of Saintes, too exhausted and hungry to go any further. There we lucked out. Dinner, breakfast and a room with a tub for the equivalent of one dollar and fifty cents in an old hotel that was shabby but clean and quiet.